Musicians often desire to collaborate across the Internet. For example:
Scenario 1: A musical composition teacher and her students live far enough apart that lessons cannot be conducted face to face. The teacher, for example, might reside in a rural area, while the student needs to live in a metropolitan environment that offers employment opportunity. Alternatively, student or teacher may be disabled and thus incapable of travel.
Scenario 2: A number of musicians wish to collaborate in the creation of a composition. The work continues over an extended period of time, and the artists cannot collocate frequently enough to be effective. They each need to play stretches of music for each other and communicate verbally about the evolving art.
There are a few devices presently available that will allow for musical collaboration over the Internet. We consider these in turn.
1. Video Conferencing. A number of video conferencing solutions exist for supporting meetings of geographically distributed participants. Assume for the moment the simple case that two sets of participants are attempting to meet. The two groups are each located in a specially equipped room.
In one approach, a video conferencing system simply records the sounds in each room and transmits the recorded sounds to a remote location. Once there, the sound is played back through loudspeakers to the remote participants. Similarly, cameras capture the scene in each room. The video signal is also transmitted and replayed at the remote site. Video cameras or other image capture devices, for example, Web Cams, can be deployed for the visual component of video conferencing. These are small, inexpensive cameras that transmit video signals across the Internet.
A common disadvantage of typical video conferencing approaches is that, once stored in digital form on a computer, the audio of musical performance snippets is difficult to manage. Typically, collaborative music sessions consist of numerous re-renderings of music fragments. When composition is the goal, musicians often generate a number of improvised alternatives. Often recording is very difficult to organize without expensive management software.
An exacerbating fact in the context of snippet organization is that the transcription of audio recordings into musical notation can also be very difficult. This task may require an expert and considerable time investment.
Finally, sounds transmitted using this system are normally limited by the quality of the instrument that generates them. A receiving musician therefore does not benefit from his own equipment's (potentially) superior capabilities. If the remote instrument is mediocre, the receiver must work with the resulting sound.
2. Custom Instruments. Custom instruments such as Yamaha's Music Path approach the problem by custom modifying acoustic grand pianos. Special sensors measure how hard piano keys are pressed during a performance. The resulting data, and video images, are transmitted to the remote piano through a high-speed connection.
The remote piano's keys and pedals are attached to mechanical actuators that physically reproduce the motions of the originating instrument. The keys and pedals at the receiving piano move “by themselves.”
This method has an advantage over the video conferencing technique: the receiving musician can hear the corresponding sounds as produced by his own instrument. Knowing his own piano well, the receiving musician can therefore judge with great refinement the effectiveness of the remote musician's key attack techniques. Similar techniques and technologies can be used for other musical instruments as well.
The custom instruments solution can be very expensive and, as with video conferencing, may be inadequate when it comes to easy snippet management.
3. Pure MIDI. Another approach is to use MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), the well-established standard for digital communication among musical instruments. MIDI defines how two or more instruments can communicate through a wire about which notes are to be played at the receiving instrument. The standard includes instructions on how to communicate the force with which, for example, piano keys are struck.
Inexpensive computer programs exist for turning MIDI into musical notation. Once available on the computer in notation, simple cut/paste manipulations can be used to arrange snippets. The snippet management problem is thereby much alleviated. Anyone who understands music can easily interact with notation. This stands in contrast to stored audio, which requires the skills of audio engineers to manipulate.
MIDI devices cover a wide range of acquisition costs. Very inexpensive units are available. The signals they produce can be of almost as high a quality as MIDI that is produced on more expensive devices. The difference between instruments instead enters into the reproduction of sound from the MIDI data stream. The MIDI stream recipient might own a MIDI-capable instrument that can produce excellent sound, while the sender operates on a much more modest keyboard.
Unfortunately, MIDI is confined to very fast communication networks, such as those comprising point-to-point wires between instruments. These wires must not exceed 50 feet.
4. Other possible approaches. It is possible to translate MIDI signals into digital form and to transport them to other instruments over a local area network (LAN). This approach may allow musicians that are situated close together within, for example, a small building, to collaborate. However, as soon as the distance between the participants grows, network delays render this solution unusable.